Enterprises today no longer have a choice about whether they embrace the cloud as their employees are already using cloud apps to perform critical business functions, often without IT's involvement.

Netskope data scientist Ram Keralapura comments: "Cloud services have penetrated enterprise ecosystems. The main drivers for this are ease-of-use, service accessibility, and a zero-footprint (hardware, software) on the enterprise."

"Organizations use cloud apps to do everything from measure employee performance, enable payroll, automate marketing, and track sales to manage software development, test the security of websites, and back up data. Looking across all of these activities, itís easy to see how organizationsí IP and confidential information can now be found in the cloud," he added.

Netskope analyzed data from its Cloud Confidence Index (CCI), a database of more than 2,600 cloud apps. They reviewed app characteristics such as security, auditability and disaster recovery, and assigned each app a CCI score between 0-100.

What immediately jumped out after analyzing the CCI data are the app categories that rank high and low in the CCI. The bottom-scoring cloud app categories in terms of average CCI score are Software Development, Marketing and Productivity. These categories fall short because they lack features such as app compliance certifications, encryption of data at rest and enforcement of complex passwords.

The top scoring cloud app categories are Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Document Management and Security. The top-scoring apps tend to address audit logging, granular role-based policies and separation of customersí data in the cloud much better than bottom-scoring apps.

Spotlight

By working with the DevOps team, you can ensure that the production environment is more predictable, auditable and more secure than before. The key is to integrate your security requirements into the DevOps pipeline.

A critical vulnerability in ANTlabs InnGate devices, a popular Internet gateway for visitor-based networks and commonly installed in hotels and convention centers, has been discovered. The flaw could allow an attacker to monitor or tamper with traffic to and from any hotel WiFi user's connection.

In this interview, Raj Samani, VP and CTO EMEA at Intel Security, talks about successful information security strategies aimed at the critical infrastructure, government challenges, the role of regulation, and more.